I made this for a swap at Christmas. My partner said her daughter loved dungeons and dragons, and well, since I'm not as great at polymer clay as I want to be....I improvised.If you can't have the whole dragon, what would be better than having their eye!

The eye doesn't stand out a lot colorwise from the rest of the eye area though so it's hard to study what's going on at first glance and you have a lot of onlays to look at. I suppose if you wanted, you could highlight or antique, etc, all the areas outside the eyeball with a metallic wax or a mica powder/etc (you'd need one in a binder or to mix with a bit of clear medium/etc though since already baked) or acrylic paint, etc, to make those areas contrast more. But there are loads of ways to explore those kinds of onlays/etc and I'm sure you'll get into a bunch of them. (If you're interested in seeing some of those ideas, check out this page at my site under the "ropey" subcategory under Dimensional:http://glassattic.com/polymer/onlay.htm...unfortunately most of the actual links in that particular Onlay subcategory have been moved or removed by their owners so here are just a few other examples from 3 people who tend to do a lot of that kind of onlays:http://mandarinmoon.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=48http://www.ebsqart.com/Artist/Christina-A-Kapono/25878/Art-Portfolio/1http://store.cforiginals.net/gallery1.html

Thanks for the ideas! I have never used wax or mics powder. I have no clue where to start either. I have only ever done plain clay with a triple thick glaze over it after. I do plan on making more dragon eyes for others though, so any help is greatly appreciated!

Polymer clayers use mica powders more often than metallic waxes for various reasons, but either can be used as well as many other colorants (the most commonly used brand of mica powder is "Pearl Ex").When the powders are used, they are most often used for "highlighting" just the upper areas of any dimensional area or item, or for "complete coverage" of the upper and lower areas.When acrylic paints are used, they're most often used for "antiquing" which is coloring only the lower areas and/or crevices of an item (the paint is rubbed all over, then wiped off of the top areas before it can dry). That can give an "aged" look but it also just gives a lot of dimension as "shadowing."

Warning though... once you start playing around with mica powders in particular, you'll probably go crazy with all the things it can do and how much bang for the buck it can give!There are several pages at my site that deal with antiquing, highlighting, completely covering, and staining, but the best place to start is probably the Molds page (just because I happened to have written most there then never moved it):http://glassattic.com/polymer/molds.htm > Antiquing, Highlighting, Staining(It's also covered on the Stamping and Texturing pages, as well as the Powders and Paints pages.)

Of course, no sealer is ever necessary on polymer clay like it is on air-dry clays and many very experienced clayers never use a liquid finish unless they need to hold something on or in certain other circumstances (though a lot of the clayers who mostly do miniatures like "charms," etc, like to high-gloss most everything). If those clayers ever want a high gloss look, they'll usually instead wet-sand then electric buff the baked clay item which can bring the clay itself up to a high-gloss shine...or they'll just take the surface up to a beautiful "sheen" with hand buffing (or shorter electric buffing), or may alternate polyurethane with sanding and buffing. (There's more about "sanding and buffing" in my answers here, if you're interested:https://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=198978.msg2111968#msg2111968https://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=165503.msg1685352#msg1685352 )